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    Rise and Fall of the Leninist State: A Marxist History of the Soviet Union
    Rise and Fall of the Leninist State: A Marxist History of the Soviet Union
    Rise and Fall of the Leninist State: A Marxist History of the Soviet Union
    Ebook140 pages2 hours

    Rise and Fall of the Leninist State: A Marxist History of the Soviet Union

    By Lenny Flank

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    About this ebook

    An economic history of the Soviet Union, from its inception in 1917 to its demise in 1991. It is in the economics of the Leninist state, not its politics or ideology, that we find the seeds of its destruction. By examining the economics of the USSR, we can see not only why the Russian Revolution took the course that it did, but why it could not have taken any other path.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLenny Flank
    Release dateSep 8, 2009
    ISBN9781452377728
    Rise and Fall of the Leninist State: A Marxist History of the Soviet Union
    Author

    Lenny Flank

    Longtime social activist, labor organizer, environmental organizer, antiwar.

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    • 5/5
      This is truly an amazing book, if you wish to learn about the Soviet Union’s economic history.

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    Rise and Fall of the Leninist State - Lenny Flank

    Rise and Fall of the Leninist State

    A Marxist History of the Soviet Union

    by Lenny Flank

    © Copyright 2008 by Lenny Flank

    All rights reserved

    Smashwords ebook edition. A print edition of this book is available from Red and Black Publishers, ISBN 978-1-934941-34-8.

    Red and Black Publishers, PO Box 7542, St Petersburg, Florida, 33734

    http://www.RedandBlackPublishers.com

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    Contents

    Preface

    Introduction

    The Economics of Revolution

    Revolution

    The Soviet Government

    Collectivization and Industrialization

    Decentralization

    Reaction

    Perestroika

    Conclusion: The Future of Leninism

    Preface

    When Mikhail Gorbachev took office in 1985, it seemed incredible to assert that the Soviet Union was about to collapse from its own internal contradictions. The reactionary Chernenko government held the reins of power, the Polish Solidarity movement had been crushed, a new Cold War with the United States was brewing. The Russian bear seemed nearly invincible. By 1990, the Soviet Union was dead.

    These events took the United States, and particularly the Left, by surprise. They shouldn’t have. The roots of the Soviet collapse can be clearly seen in the economic experiments of the 1960’s. In fact, the economic crises to which the Gorbachev revolution was a response can be traced back to the very structure of pre-Revolutionary Russia.

    As a revolutionary Marxist, I think it is imperative that we examine the development of the Soviet Union, both in theory and in actual practice, and that we understand the historical and material circumstances which prompted that development. By doing so, we can in the future, I hope, avoid the mistakes and horrors inflicted upon revolutionary socialism by the Marxist-Leninists. I hope that we can transform socialism from a regimented work camp into a humanistic social whole.

    Lenny Flank

    December 2007

    Introduction

    In March 1985, Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko, a staunch Old Guard conservative and Brezhnev protege, died and was replaced by Mikhail Gorbachev. Immediately after assuming power, Gorbachev announced plans to carry out sweeping reforms within the massive Soviet economic bureaucracy, and introduced free-market methods of monetary incentives and decentralized economic decision-making as methods of rejuvenating the stagnating Soviet economy. Gorbachev referred to this process as perestroika, or restructuring.

    In 1989, within the space of a few months, the Communist nations of Eastern Europe underwent a series of profound convulsions. Enthusiastically embracing perestroika and glasnost, the East Europeans rose en masse and drove the old Stalinist bureaucrats from power. Within months, the Leninist empire was dead.

    The Western powers hailed these actions as a new revolution, and happily declared that communism is dead. Many leftists and radical theorists were thrown into a panic by the Gorbachev revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, declaring it to be a crisis of Marxism.

    In these discussions and disputes, the Western press and most leftist commentators on perestroika have accepted the Soviet Union’s assertion that the Revolution of October 1917 that brought the Bolsheviks to power resulted in the overthrow of the capitalist order and its substitution by socialism, and that the Soviet Union was a communist country that operated according to the principles described by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Even those leftist critics who attacked the policies of the USSR have, for the most part, accepted the proposition that the Soviet Union started its development as a socialist country—they simply assert that this development has proceeded abnormally.

    This book seeks to examine the political and economic history of the Soviet Union from its birth in 1917 to its recent demise. This study will focus largely on the economic factors affecting the development of the Soviet Union, which both Marx and Lenin considered crucial to understanding the development of any human society. This is done not only in order to examine the Leninist state in its own terms, but also because Marx’s emphasis on the economic factors provides the clearest picture of the development of the Leninist state. It is in the economy of the Communist state, not in its politics or ideology, that we find the seeds of its destruction.

    Therefore, by examining the economic development of the USSR, we will see, not only why the Russian Revolution progressed as it did, but why it could not have progressed in any other way. We will see clearly the factors which demanded the establishment of the Leninist state, as well as the equally compelling reasons for its downfall.

    This work, then, will present historical and economic examples which illustrate the following thesis: The most basic cause of the Russian Revolution was the urgent need to industrialize the economy and to throw off the restrictions of a largely feudalist agrarian economy. In the history of Western Europe, the transition from an agrarian feudal economy to an industrial capitalist one had been carried out by the rising bourgeoisie, acting in alliance with the peasantry and the working class.

    The Western path of development had, however, been rendered impossible in Russia by the near-total domination of the Russian economy by foreign financial interests. This foreign domination both hindered the development of a native bourgeois class and limited the economic and political power this class was able to gather.

    As a result of the bourgeoisie’s weakness, the task of industrializing the Russian economy fell to the professional middle class, or petty bourgeoisie, which gathered Russia’s meager economic resources and, using a rigid system of planned economic expansion, succeeded in producing the rudiments of an industrialized economy. This process necessitated a program of nationalization and confiscation, placing all economic resources in the hands of the state.

    By the 1960’s, however, the rigid central hierarchy which had enabled the economy to expand so rapidly through the 1930’s had begun instead to restrict and limit its future growth. In an attempt to alleviate these problems, Kruschev began a program of relaxing central control over the planning process and of placing economic power in the hands of the individual enterprise managers. Perestroika was an expansion of this process.

    This, however, demanded the delegation of more and more autonomy to the lower levels of the economic system, eventually giving the factory managers de facto control over the economy. At this point, decentralized production came to be in conflict with the central planning apparatus. The result was the overthrow of the Leninist centralized economy and the introduction of a capitalist economy based on the free market and private ownership over resources. The Communist state fell, and was replaced by a Western-style democratic republic.

    To see where the Leninist state is heading, we must understand from where it has come. We therefore begin our study with an examination of the economic circumstances which produced the Soviet Union.

    ONE: The Economics of Revolution

    (1800 to 1905)

    The Bolshevik coup of October 1917 resulted in the birth of the revolutionary strategy known as Leninism. While the physical overthrow of the Tsarist government took place in 1917, the economic preconditions for the revolt had been steadily growing throughout the 1800’s. To fully understand the success of the Leninist revolution, we must understand the preconditions which made it possible.

    When Tsar Alexander II took the throne in 1855, Russia was in the midst of drastic changes. The old autocratic feudal system was rapidly disintegrating. The agriculturally-based economy was simply no longer suited to the needs of the population, while the development of manufacturing and industry was hampered by economic and political conditions. The majority of the population was composed of serfs and peasants, who lived in poverty while a small portion of the population, the landowners and the aristocracy, controlled most of the nation’s resources.

    Clearly, this situation could not be changed without a radical upheaval that would completely destroy the old feudal network. An examination of the economic trends within Russia during the 19th century reveals that such a change had already begun.

    Trotsky, in his study of the Russian Revolution, points out, The basic criterion of the economic level of a nation is the productivity of labor, which in its turn depends upon the relative weight of the industries in the general economy of the country.

    Measured by this yardstick, the economic level of Russia by 1820 was low, but advances were being made. Small industries were developing in the towns and villages, while light industry was taking root in the peasant mir, or communal peasant farms. Economically, Russia was at the level that had been reached by Western Europe in the late 1600’s. Like its European predecessors, Russian society was poised on the edge of a leap that would industrialize and mechanize its economy and, at the same time, revolutionize its political and social order. Engels points out that, in Europe as well as in Russia, this leap towards industrialization was vital:

    Before capitalist production, i.e., in the Middle Ages, the system of petty industry generally prevailed, based upon the private property of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the agriculture of the small peasant, freemen or serf; in the town, the handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor—land, agricultural implements, the work-shop, the tool—were the instruments of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But for this very reason they belonged, as a rule, to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day—this was precisely the historic role of capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie.

    By the 19th century, Russia’s economy, still based on the feudalist agrarian activity typical of the period before capitalism, was unable to meet the needs of the population. Through necessity, the Russians were forced to increase the productivity of their labor. This could be done only in one way—the same way in which the Europeans had solved the same dilemma—the organization of individual industries into the factory system typical of capitalism.

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